Post by Ace on Nov 21, 2009 12:37:47 GMT -5
Tim's world
NY. Post: Burton sure gives good show at MoMA
By LOU LUMENICK
Last Updated: 9:11 AM, November 21, 2009
If you thought Tim Burton had a delightfully twisted imagination based on his feature films such as “Edward Scissorhands” and “Beetlejuice,” you ain’t seen nothing yet.
MoMA opens a blockbuster show tomorrow with a cornucopia of more than 700 items, including weird sculptures, black-velvet paintings, Polaroid photos and sketches covering four decades — almost none of which have ever been shown publicly.<p> </p><br> “A lot of stuff was just for projects and thought processes,” says Burton, who allowed curators Ron Magliozzi and Jenny He to ransack his huge private archives and even his home in London.
“I thought I’d left certain images a long time ago, but then you realized you’re still obsessed with certain things and all that.”
Even those casually acquainted with Burton’s film work know the Goth genius is one of the world’s leading practitioners of what used to be called “sick” humor — obsessed with death, deformity, creepy clowns and an assortment of horror and fantasy tropes.
It’s apparent from the show — you enter through a monster’s head based on a design he created for an abandoned 1980 film project — that these were on Burton’s mind even when he was a disaffected middle-school student in Burbank, Calif., starring in horror movies he shot on Super 8.
One of his monster-themed designs — Burton’s influences include Edward Gorey, Maurice Sendak and Picasso — won a contest for anti-littering signs attached to the city’s garbage trucks.
Also in the show are selections from Burton’s sketchbooks as a student at the California Institute of the Arts, where he doodled creatures in the margins during life studies. From there he became an animator at Disney, where his humorously morbid obsessions were a less than ideal fit for the cheery “The Fox and the Hound.”
Burton was more enthusiastic about “The Dark Cauldron,” but his rejected concept sketches of oozing, stretched-out beings for that Disney animated feature were just too dark for the Mouse House.
Besides continuous showings of his two well-known animated Disney shorts (“Vincent” and “Frankenweenie”), monitors at the exhibit offer his delightfully bizarre, live-action TV version of “Hansel and Gretel,” long believed to be lost after a showing on the Disney Channel in 1982.
“The reason [Disney] doesn’t have a copy is because I tried to burn them all myself,” Burton jokes.
“I think they showed it once at 3 a.m. on Halloween night. ”
Fans of Burton’s feature films — all 14 of them are being shown at MoMA, along with 27 by other filmmakers he’s chosen as influences — will not be disappointed by the vast collection of costumes, props, puppets and models assembled for the exhibit. There’s Johnny Depp’s angora sweater from “Ed Wood,” knives from “Sweeney Todd” and decapitated foam replicas of Sarah Jessica Parker and Pierce Brosnan’s heads from the neglected “Mars Attacks!”
Plus you’ll see puppets from “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and Michelle Pfeiffer’s latex Catwoman suit from Burton’s underrated “Batman Returns.”
Burton, who will offer his take on “Alice in Wonderland” with Depp as the Mad Hatter next spring, has created seven new works especially for the MoMA exhibit. They include a weird three-story sculpture called “Balloon Boy” that guards a replica of a deer-shaped “Edward Scissorhands” topiary that’s been installed in the museum’s Sculpture Garden.
The wonderful “Tim Burton” is effectively a stroll through this artist’s head.
NY. Post: Burton sure gives good show at MoMA
By LOU LUMENICK
Last Updated: 9:11 AM, November 21, 2009
If you thought Tim Burton had a delightfully twisted imagination based on his feature films such as “Edward Scissorhands” and “Beetlejuice,” you ain’t seen nothing yet.
MoMA opens a blockbuster show tomorrow with a cornucopia of more than 700 items, including weird sculptures, black-velvet paintings, Polaroid photos and sketches covering four decades — almost none of which have ever been shown publicly.<p> </p><br> “A lot of stuff was just for projects and thought processes,” says Burton, who allowed curators Ron Magliozzi and Jenny He to ransack his huge private archives and even his home in London.
“I thought I’d left certain images a long time ago, but then you realized you’re still obsessed with certain things and all that.”
Even those casually acquainted with Burton’s film work know the Goth genius is one of the world’s leading practitioners of what used to be called “sick” humor — obsessed with death, deformity, creepy clowns and an assortment of horror and fantasy tropes.
It’s apparent from the show — you enter through a monster’s head based on a design he created for an abandoned 1980 film project — that these were on Burton’s mind even when he was a disaffected middle-school student in Burbank, Calif., starring in horror movies he shot on Super 8.
One of his monster-themed designs — Burton’s influences include Edward Gorey, Maurice Sendak and Picasso — won a contest for anti-littering signs attached to the city’s garbage trucks.
Also in the show are selections from Burton’s sketchbooks as a student at the California Institute of the Arts, where he doodled creatures in the margins during life studies. From there he became an animator at Disney, where his humorously morbid obsessions were a less than ideal fit for the cheery “The Fox and the Hound.”
Burton was more enthusiastic about “The Dark Cauldron,” but his rejected concept sketches of oozing, stretched-out beings for that Disney animated feature were just too dark for the Mouse House.
Besides continuous showings of his two well-known animated Disney shorts (“Vincent” and “Frankenweenie”), monitors at the exhibit offer his delightfully bizarre, live-action TV version of “Hansel and Gretel,” long believed to be lost after a showing on the Disney Channel in 1982.
“The reason [Disney] doesn’t have a copy is because I tried to burn them all myself,” Burton jokes.
“I think they showed it once at 3 a.m. on Halloween night. ”
Fans of Burton’s feature films — all 14 of them are being shown at MoMA, along with 27 by other filmmakers he’s chosen as influences — will not be disappointed by the vast collection of costumes, props, puppets and models assembled for the exhibit. There’s Johnny Depp’s angora sweater from “Ed Wood,” knives from “Sweeney Todd” and decapitated foam replicas of Sarah Jessica Parker and Pierce Brosnan’s heads from the neglected “Mars Attacks!”
Plus you’ll see puppets from “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and Michelle Pfeiffer’s latex Catwoman suit from Burton’s underrated “Batman Returns.”
Burton, who will offer his take on “Alice in Wonderland” with Depp as the Mad Hatter next spring, has created seven new works especially for the MoMA exhibit. They include a weird three-story sculpture called “Balloon Boy” that guards a replica of a deer-shaped “Edward Scissorhands” topiary that’s been installed in the museum’s Sculpture Garden.
The wonderful “Tim Burton” is effectively a stroll through this artist’s head.